My Asia Brief audio report on the history Americans don’t know… but drives current events on the Korean peninsula. Resentment at the sacrifice of Korea to U.S. Cold War ambitions and the Japanese alliance runs deep…and Koreans in the North and South are finally able to do something about it.

The Korean War was a desperate and dubious battle in which the US was ready to try anything and everything to overcome its strategic and tactical disadvantages. Biological weapons, nuclear weapons…and Douglas MacArthur’s plans for a strategic breakout via escalation of the Korean conflict to a regional war. Everything was on the table.

Douglas MacArthur made the first US attempt to parlay a Korean crisis into an existential confrontation with the People’s Republic of China. With the US milsec establishment, his ideas are more popular—and dangerous—than ever. My documentary uses first hand testimony and declassified archives to finally reveal the truth behind this long-suppressed event.

For viewers of this episode’s segment on John Wayne and the Downwinders who wish to dig deeper into the issue of cancer and atomic fallout, in 2014 I used an undercovered crisis—the extensive contamination of the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan by radioactive fallout from the Fukushima nuclear power plant during post-earthquake and tsunami relief operations off the coast of Japan in 2011—to do a deep dive for CounterPunch Magazine on the US government’s systemic suppression and distortion of public health science concerning the dangers of nuclear radiation. It’s a sobering story of decades of government finagling of numerous radiation incidents including the biggest fallout event you never heard of: a massive washout of radioactive material onto Albany, New York. And it covers the controversies—and crimes—like no other article in the popular press. Available for purchase at the link.